Category Archives: Comparative politics

The Russian State Duma does not have a reputation for grilling executive officials. Especially since United Russia – the Putin-supporting “party of power” – has controlled a majority of seats in the 450-seat lower chamber of the Federal Assembly, the Duma has done little to act as a check on executive behaviour. In that way, it acts as we expect other parliaments do in non-democracies – a source of strength, rather than irritation, for executive actors.

Nevertheless, the State Duma has the formal capacity for some form of executive oversight. During “government hour” sessions, executive officials are invited to respond to questions from deputies. Figure 1 shows the frequency of these sessions, 2005-2017.

The mere fact that these nominal oversight sessions take place does not, of course, tell us if this is more than mere performance. A key question is whether deputies ask needling, critical questions.

Another important question is who is invited to be questioned by deputies. One way to classify Russian executive actors is by whether their respective bodies are controlled directly (formally, at least) by the president or the government. According to article 32 of Federal Constitutional Law number 2 from 1997 (with amendments), the president directly controls the Ministries of Internal Affairs, Defence, Justice, Foreign Affairs, and Emergency Situations, as well as a number of federal agencies and services, including the Federal Security Service (FSB). All other executive bodies are formally controlled by the government.

This divide in direct control is found in other states, including Vietnam, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Myanmar. In the latter, for example, the Constitution states that the military controls a number of core bodies, such as the Ministry of Mines, the Ministry of Border Affairs, and the Ministry of Home Affairs.

We can think of this executive divide in terms of delegation and principal-agent relationships. In most (if not all) regimes, there will be a leader – whether that be, for example, a monarch, president, general secretary, or a collective body, such as a junta. For shorthand, we can refer to them as “autocrats”. At the same time, the executive can contain other actors, to whom responsibility for certain portfolios are delegated. Thus, whereas the “autocrat” likely retains control over sensitive portfolios relating to security and state sovereignty, non-“autocrat” elements of the executive can be delegated portfolios relating to, say, economic policy.

This division is attractive to elites, not least because it allows for blame deflection during periods of economic hardship. The “autocrat” can use other executive actors as a buffer from societal criticism – something that has been on display recently in Iran, where the president, Hassan Rouhani, was recently grilled by legislators over the deteriorating economic situation. The Guardian Council is, therefore, partially shielded from popular opprobrium.

Executive oversight in the legislature also allows “autocrats” to keep tabs on delegated executive portfolios. By subjecting non-“autocrat” elements of the executive to legislative scrutiny, the hope is to reduce possible agency loss – that is, that agents end up pursuing their own interests, rather than those of their principals.

Going back to Russia, we can ask a basic question: Does executive oversight performed by parliamentarians differ when aimed at officials from president-controlled bodies (PCBs) compared to government-controlled bodies (GCBs)?

In a recent article on executive oversight in the Vietnamese National Assembly, Paul Schuler – a political scientist from the University of Arizona – demonstrates that legislators are able to discuss “hot topics” relating to portfolios delegated from the Communist Party of Vietnam to the government. By contrast, “hot topics” relating to the policy areas of those executive portfolios directly controlled by the Party are off limits. The Party, therefore, allows the legislature to engage in executive oversight, but only in areas that will not make the Party vulnerable to direct critique.

Does the same happen in Russia? To get at this, we can ask a simpler question: Are PCB officials subjected to fewer “government hour” sessions in the State Duma than their GCB colleagues? To answer this, Maxim Ananyev – a Lecturer in UCLA’s Political Science Department – Paul Schuler, and I collected data on “government hour” sessions, 2005-2017. Basic information relates to the date of query sessions, as well as the identity of executive officials, and whether they have posts in president- or government-controlled bodies.

The Russian case is particularly interesting, given Vladimir Putin’s stint as prime minister, 2008-2012. Constitutionally barred from holding a third consecutive term in the presidency, Putin made use of the formally semi-presidential nature of the Russian Constitution, moving to the premiership until resuming the presidency in 2012, with Medvedev moving to the prime ministership.

This switch in formal roles is interesting insofar as it means that Putin’s direct control over executive bodies varied over time. Now, some readers will, no doubt, say that formal control means nothing – especially in Russia and especially with regard to Putin. That hunch may well be well-grounded. At the same time, it is an empirical question amenable to study whether Putin’s move to the premiership affected executive oversight behaviour in the State Duma. Indeed, we can generate some expectations. If Putin remained the “autocrat”, 2005-2017, but was not president, 2008-2012, then it is plausible that he would want to use mechanisms to keep tabs on the performance of those bodies he was used to controlling directly – that is, president-controlled bodies – but which were now controlled (formally, at least) by President Medvedev. Executive oversight in the Duma could be one such mechanism. If that were the case, then we would expect to see increased PCB oversight, 2008-2012.

Figure 2 presents data on the percentage of “government hour” sessions involving officials from PCBs by year. The horizontal dashed line marks the percentage of all executive bodies that are controlled directly by the president. If PCBs were overseen at the same “rate” as GCBs (proportional to their makeup of the executive as a whole), then “government hour” appearance figures should fall around this line.

Figure 2:Percentage of all “government hour” appearances involving officials from president-controlled bodies by year, 2005-2017. Bars around data points represent 95% confidence intervals. The dashed vertical lines mark the approximate break points between the Putin and Medvedev presidencies. The dotted horizontal line marks the average percentage of all executive bodies that are PCBs for the period as a whole. Source: author’s calculations based on “government hour” planning documents, available from https://pravo.gov.ru (last accessed 14 August 2018).

The pattern is striking. During Medvedev’s presidency, there was a dramatic increase in PCB oversight. On Putin’s return to the presidency, there was a dramatic decrease in PCB oversight. This pattern is consistent with the idea that Putin used “government hour” sessions to keep tabs on president-controlled bodies during his time as prime minister. It is plausible that he was able to do this, given the stronger ties he had (compared to Medvedev) with legislative agenda-setting actors, such as the State Duma speakers during his premiership, Boris Gryzlov and Sergei Naryshkin. When Putin was president himself, however, PCB oversight was largely lower than would be expected if PCB officials were scrutinised at the same rate as GCB officials (proportional to their makeup of the executive as a whole).

Presidential inaugurations in Russia take place on 7 May. That means that 2008 and 2012 need to be split into Putin and Medvedev periods. Figures 3 and 4 present data on the percentage of “government hour” sessions involving officials from PCBs by presidential periods within these two years.

The patterns are consistent with the picture provided by figure 2: PCB oversight was higher during Medvedev’s presidency than during Putin’s presidencies.

One clear alternative reason for why president-controlled bodies might be overseen by legislators with less vigour than government-controlled bodies is that PCBs handle sensitive subjects. The regime leadership might make clear that such topics are off bounds for parliamentary scrutiny. However, if this were the case, we should not observe changes in PCB oversight across the Putin and Medvedev presidential periods, as the sensitivity of executive bodies should remain relatively stable over time. But we, clearly, do not observe this.

There are a few anomalies with respect to the “autocrat” delegation explanation, however. Firstly, 2008 – why did PCB oversight remain low during Medvedev’s first year in the presidency? Secondly, 2013 – why did PCB oversight not fall even more dramatically on Putin’s return to the presidency? And, finally, 2017 – what explains the upshot in PCB oversight?

Along with answering these questions, much more analysis remains to be done. Most importantly, we need to explore whether meaningful oversight of the executive does, in fact, take place during “government hour” sessions. And we need to entertain alternative explanations. For example, might increased PCB oversight during Medvedev’s presidency reflect his preference for more transparency or checks on executive power?

Regardless of the real answer, this preliminary analysis joins the growing body of work challenging the idea that legislatures in authoritarian regimes are merely ‘rubber stamps’. Evidence from Russia suggests this can involve oversight of the executive in parliament, but needling questions are directed at bodies not directly controlled by Putin.

In this article we focus on the influence of formally weak presidents over the outcome of the government formation, which is often neglected in scholarly literature. However, as contemporary Czech or Slovak presidents have shown, weak presidents may still become key players in the process leading to appointment of government, i.e. a collective body headed by prime minister, who can be considered to be the chief executive in most European countries. The task of assessing the role of presidents in the government formation process (GFP) is tricky. One can take account of formal presidential powers enshrined in constitutions, but as many researchers have shown[i], formal powers may not tell us much about the real influence presidents exert over the GFP. It should be borne in mind that the actual influence of presidents varies from case to case. It is contingent on a number of circumstances, such as the president’s relationship with the parliamentary majority, the president’s political orientation, the degree of fragmentation of the party system, the organizational capacity of parties, historical precedents, the public’s expectations of the president, the president’s popularity and informal authority, the mode of election of the president, the timing of the presidential election, etc.[ii]

In order to assess the degree of influence presidents have over the GFP, we developed a classification of the roles of presidents in the GFP reflecting real practice, moving beyond comparing formal constitutional rules. We believe that this simple qualitative framework enables us to compare the degree of presidential influence within single presidencies (the degree of influence may vary significantly from one government formation to another), within a polity as well as across polities.

When analyzing the GFP,[iii] it is necessary to examine formal-constitutional rules regulating the GFP, as well as the actual course of the GFP in terms of real politics. An analysis of the GFP in European states in formal terms, e.g. studying constitutional texts, shows that government formation is the result of negotiations between parliamentary parties (and also among them) and the president (although the former is usually stronger than the latter)[iv]. Hence, it is logical to distinguish between parliamentary and presidential cabinets. The parliamentary cabinet largely results from an agreement between parliamentary parties. The president’s role in the GFP is rather formal: he/she formally confirms the cabinet determined by the parliamentary parties. On the other hand, the presidential cabinet primarily reflects the will of the president, whereas the parliamentary parties’ role in the GFP is only secondary. In political practice we can find a number of examples which are somewhere in between the two above-mentioned cases: these cabinets are formed as a compromise between the parties and the president, with each holding a varying degree of influence. The whole process can be seen as a trade-off: the greater the influence a president has over the GFP, the less influence the parliamentary parties exert and vice versa. For this reason, we define more subtle categories, which are presented below from the perspective of the president. The categories mainly reflect the real influence of the president in the GFP. Our classification categories are compiled inductively, i.e. on the basis of a generalization of knowledge about the GFP in particular European countries:[v] 1) observer, 2) notary, 3) regulator, 4) co-designer and 5) creator (see table below).

Table: Presidents’ influence over the GFP

Control over the GFP

Political preferences

Level of activity

Observer

no

irrelevant

no

Notary

limited

irrelevant

low

Regulator

medium

relevant

medium

Co-designer

main

relevant

high

Creator

exclusive

relevant

very high

This classification is further based on the assumption that the activity level of parliamentary parties may differ significantly from that of the president. While weaker heads of state (observer or notary) are rather passive and let the parliamentary parties take the initiative, stronger presidents (co-designer and creator) tend to be more active and play a more important role in the GFP. The extent of the actors’ activity is also linked to the relevance of their political preferences as to the government and its shape. While weaker heads of state do not display their preferences (as they are irrelevant anyway), stronger presidents tend to reveal their preferences in an effort to defend the steps they take in the course of the GFP.

Let us explore the categories in more detail. The observer, unlike any of the following patterns, has neither a formal nor an informal role in the GFP. In this case, the GFP is exclusively in the hands of the parliament. However, in European republics we cannot find any president that would fit the observer pattern (nevertheless, the observer type can surely be identified in some European monarchies: Sweden since 1975 and the Netherlands since 2012).

The regulator plays a relatively important role in the GFP. S/he is involved (directly or through mediators) in parties’ bargaining over a new cabinet. The regulator reveals his/her political preferences, which are thus relevant to the outcome of the GFP. S/he does not necessarily come up with his own government alternative. However, s/he may set some conditions for the new cabinet, e.g. a preference for a majority cabinet; a preference for a cabinet that includes/excludes a certain party or some candidates for prime ministers, ministers etc. The role of the regulator is no longer passive, but rather reactive. S/he expects that parties will propose their alternatives for the future cabinet within the limits set by him/her and s/he reveals his/her preferences for a certain alternative. Good examples of this situation come from Austria in the 1950s.[vii]

The co-designer is a strong player in the GFP and his/her overall influence over the outcome of this process is greater than that of the parliamentary parties. Unlike the regulator who does not usually propose governmental alternatives on his/her own, nor does s/he assert them, the co-designer promotes his/her own idea and composition of the future cabinet, and his/her opinion largely, but not completely, determines the outcome of the GFP. The co-designer is typically a powerful president, who however lacks majority support in parliament and who cannot afford to push his/her idea completely independently and against the will of the parliament. Instead, s/he needs cooperative parliamentary parties to set up the new cabinet. The co-designer can also be identified in situations in which a president has fewer constitutional powers in the GFP, but the parliamentary parties are unable to generate a cabinet on their own and thus encourage the president to step significantly into the process, so that an originally weak president becomes a co-designer. It follows from our observations that co-designer is rather infrequent pattern. Still, we can identify some examples[viii].

The creator clearly dominates the GFP. S/he forms the cabinet alone, in line with his/her ideas and political preferences. Parliament’s role is either limited to a minimum (e.g. formalizing the president’s choice in a vote of confidence) or parliament is out of the game altogether (in countries were the new cabinet is not obliged to ask for confidence). The designer creates so-called “presidential cabinets”, i.e. cabinets that are created primarily at the will of the president, while the parliament is sidelined.[ix] The creator is typical for countries where the president is usually responsible for the executive and has a wide range of executive powers. S/he is at the same time the leader of the parliamentary majority, and it is generally expected that the president will actually determine the government. French presidents during the Fifth Republic are a classic example. Of course, with the exception of the periods of cohabitation, when president faces a parliamentary majority from a different political camp. However, a creator might be also a president who is formally strong enough to appoint his/her own presidential (usually technocratic) cabinet, even though s/he lacks the support of the parliamentary majority, and the continuation of such a government in power and pursuit of its program may be extremely problematic.[xi] Good examples of this practice might be three short-lived technocratic cabinets appointed by the Portuguese president António Eanes in 1978 and 1979.[xi].

The classification can be applied almost to both republics and monarchies, indeed all cases where the government is a separate executive body from the head of state. Our classification rests on the qualitative assessment of individual cases of the GFP and requires detailed information about each GFP. Yet, it allows us to compare heads of state with different formal powers in different countries and different periods of time, thus making it a useful tool for comparative analysis. It may help us demonstrate that even extremely weak heads of state may occassionally significantly affect the outcome of the GFP, which cannot be reduced only to inter-party bargaining and coalition theories.

Notes

[i] E.g. M. Duverger, “A new political system model: semi‐presidential government.” European Journal of Political Research 8(1980);

[ii] O. Protsyk, “Prime Ministers’ Identity in Semi-Presidential Regimes: Constitutional Norms and Cabinet Formation Outcomes”; O. Neto and K. Strøm, “Breaking the Parliamentary Chain of Delegation: Presidents and Non-partisan Cabinet Members in European Democracies.“ P. Köker, “Presidential Activism and Veto Power in Central and Eastern Europe.”; S. G. Kang, “The influence of presidential heads of state on government formation in European democracies: Empirical evidence.”

[iii] In line with the literature, we analyze the GFP when a new cabinet is to be formed after one of the following situations: 1) parliamentary elections, 2) PM’s resignation, including the fall of the cabinet following a successful vote of no-confidence, or rejection to pass a vote of confidence in the cabinet, 3) cabinet is recalled by the head of state, 4) change of partisan composition of the cabinet. Cf. J. Woldendorp, H. Keman and I. Budge. Party Government in 48 Democracies (1945-1998): Composition –Duration –Personnel (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 2000).

[vi] This pattern can be also found in parliamentary monarchies where the sovereign is equipped with formally great powers but, in accordance with constitutional traditions, does not fully use them and lets the parliament decide on the future cabinet. The monarch only formalizes such decisions (e.g. Great Britain).

This is a guest post by Paul Chaisty and Timothy J. Power. It is based on their paper ‘Flying solo: Explaining single-party cabinets under minority presidentialism’, that is currently available in European Journal of Political Research.

It is now widely acknowledged that presidents whose parties lack majority support in their assemblies attempt to overcome their minority status by building cross-party alliances. Since the onset of the Third Wave of democratisation, presidents in general, and minority presidents in particular have governed with multi-party cabinet coalitions on a frequent basis. Like prime ministers in parliamentary systems, presidents do this through the formation of cabinet coalitions, defined minimally as the awarding of at least one portfolio to a party other than the nominal party of the president. The preponderance of minority presidents and coalition governments has increased as party systems have become more fragmented. Between 1974 and 2013, on average just over half of all minority presidents in political systems that meet minimum democratic standards have governed with multiparty cabinets.

Nonetheless, a large proportion of minority presidents continue to govern with single party cabinets. Whereas 20 per cent of minority prime ministers in parliamentary systems formed their cabinets on a single party basis between 1974 and 2013, unipartisan governments were observed in minority presidential systems almost half of the time (49 per cent). This is puzzling given the many benefits that presidents derive from sharing executive power. Over the last decade, political scientists working almost exclusively on Latin American politics have found for instance that minority presidents who form coalitions increase their legislative productivity (Saiegh 2011) and lower the likelihood of impeachment or removal in times of crisis (Pérez-Liñán 2007).

What explains the adoption of single-party cabinets by minority presidents? In our new article, ‘Flying solo: Explaining single-party cabinets under minority presidentialism’, published last month on-line first by the European Journal of Political Research, we explore this puzzle through cross-sectional time-series analysis of all situations of minority presidentialism in both democracies and semidemocracies between 1974 and 2013. Our analysis covers 610 country-years of minority presidential situations, in which we observe a roughly even split between cabinet coalitions and unipartisan government. Hypotheses are tested that relate to the size and distribution of the formateur (presidential) and largest non-formateur parties that make up the legislature; the nature of party linkages and ideological distance between the president and possible partisan allies; and the extent of reactive veto powers held by the president.

We show that the decision by minority presidents to ‘fly solo’ – that is, to appoint a cabinet made up exclusively of co-partisans – is a function of four main factors: the size of the president’s own party; the concentration of legislative seats in the hands of one non-formateur party; the degree of particularism in the party system; and the institutional capacity of the president to kill or amend unwanted legislation passed by the assembly. Minority presidents who are close to a majority in the assembly, who face a dominant alternative party on the floor, who coexist with party systems in which particularism predominates over programmatic politics, and who possess strong veto powers are significantly more likely to preside over unipartisan governments. Other factors that have been hypothesised to affect presidential strategies – for example the imminence of presidential elections – are found to have little or no effect on this most fundamental of cabinet choices. All of these findings are robust to the inclusion of regional controls.

Of all the factors that we consider in this analysis, the size of the formateur party in the legislature is the strongest stand-alone predictor of single-party cabinets. When all the other variables are held at their means, executives whose parties controlled 49.8 per cent of the seats in the assembly (the maximum value for a minority president under our coding rules) are 47 percentage points more likely to form a unipartisan cabinet than presidents with no legislative co-partisans. We note that this effect takes a linear form: the probability of a non-coalitional outcome increases more or less monotonically in line with the size of the formateur party (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Predicted probabilities of unipartisan cabinets for four key causal variables, at minimum and maximum values with confidence intervals.

The dominance of a single party over the bloc of non-formateur parties in the assembly is also found to be highly significant. When all other variables were held at their means, those non-formateur parties that controlled 100 per cent of the non-formateur bloc are 46 percentage points more likely to coexist with single-party governments than when the largest non-formateur party held less than 10 per cent of the seats within the non-presidential contingent. Minority presidents operating within party systems characterised by particularistic linkages are also more likely to have single-party cabinets (18 percentage points more likely) than minority presidents facing programmatic party systems. Finally, minority presidents who command strong veto powers are 46 percentage points more likely to form single-party cabinets than presidents with no veto power, holding all other variables at their means.

Therefore, we have moved a bit closer to solving a vexing puzzle about minority presidents. The takeaway message is that presidential authority matters, and it has specific and directional impacts on minority presidents. Their cabinet decisions are affected not only by how close they are to a working majority, but also by the size and salience of prominent nonformateur parties. Presidents whose parties do not control a majority of the assembly are keenly aware of legislative mathematics. These mathematics (i.e. seat distributions) are normally measured by the effective number of parties (Laakso and Taagepera, 1979) or by a Herfindahl fractionalisation index (e.g. Figueiredo et al., 2012).We contend that these aggregate measures are blind to the size and identity of existing political parties, and instead we profile the nonpresidential contingent by measuring the dominance of a single non-formateur party within this bloc. This indicator is far more actor-sensitive than measures of party fragmentation: it captures the relevance of any organised alternative to the party of the incumbent; it can be thought of as a measure of positional rivalry or competition rather than one of dispersion. Simply put, the configuration (as opposed to the fragmentation) of the nonpresidential contingent in the assembly may affect not only the likelihood that invitations to join the cabinet will be issued, but also the probability that these invitations will be accepted.

Our analysis also concurs with recent work that places greater importance on the non-cabinet strategies that presidents use to manage particularistic parties (Kellam 2015; Chaisty and Chernykh 2017). This work shows that presidents may desist from using cabinet powers when forming coalitions in particularistic party systems. Hence, presidents who choose to form single-party cabinets may still form multi-party legislative coalitions in other ways.

Finally, our analysis suggests that the reactive legislative powers of presidents matter. Far from what is implied in a textbook ‘separation of powers’ model, most directly elected presidents around the world have substantial legislative authority, including the power to veto bills either wholly or partially. In this analysis, we find that those minority presidents with strong reactive vetoes are more likely to form unipartisan governments.

Our global, large-N research design trades away some ‘depth’ in return for ‘breadth’. However, the findings here suggest promising avenues of inquiry for presidentialism research in regions where data quality is high and omitted variables can be reinserted (e.g., Latin America), and may help us to establish some parameters for crafting appropriate case study research on the strategic choices of minority presidents.

This is a guest post by Ignacio Arana Araya, Institute for Politics and Strategy, Carnegie Mellon University

Mainstream media and political analysts seem obsessed covering the eccentricities and peculiarities of the occupant of the White House, adventuring how Trump’s limitations as a statesman may have undesired impacts on executive governance. Trump’s unpredictable behavior and decision-making style have stunned many observers, but both recent and historical presidents of the Americas also had flamboyant personalities (and performances). Idiosyncratic presidents, in fact, have always existed. Not so long ago, Presidents Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (1999-2013) and Abdalá Bucaram of Ecuador (1996-1997) used to hit international headlines for their extravagances. Bucaram, popularly nicknamed “El Loco,” was eventually impeached by Congress for – officially – being a madman. What these eccentric characters remind us is that those who hold the most important political offices in their countries bring their unique personalities to power with them, and such uniqueness has an impact on their performance. However, students of the presidency have generally failed to quantitatively measure how the personality traits of the leaders may impact executive governance.

Arguably, this failure occurs mainly because students of the presidency have failed to absorb research on differential psychology. This brand of psychological research studies the individual differences of humans, or how people differ from each other in how they feel, act, think and behave. Absorbing the theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions of the differential psychology literature would also allow integrating the research of scholars who focus on the “personal” presidency and those who center on the “institutional” presidency.

Both research streams have run through parallel corridors, leading to conflicting views on how the presidency works. The president-centered (also called “personality-centered”) approach examines decision making in the executive branch based on presidential behavior. Scholars from this group examine the ability of presidents to persuade individuals and organizations to accommodate policy making to their preferences. They argue that the heads of government have plenty of room to act and decide at their own discretion. Since the individual attributes of the leaders influence policy outcomes, it is necessary to analyze the personal characteristics of the leaders to understand executive politics (Neustadt 1960; Barber 1972; Greenstein 2009).

In contrast, presidency-centered (also called “institutional presidency”) studies minimize the importance of presidents as individuals and center the explanation of policy outcomes on the institutional setting in which heads of government work (e.g., Moe 1993; Dickinson 2004; Lewis 2008). The central assumption in this approach is that different presidents will behave similarly in identical contexts. It regards the study of the characteristics of the leaders as unworthy because more explanatory leverage is -supposedly- gained when scholars analyze the effect of institutional factors on policy outcomes.

The opposing theoretical views have contributed to a divide of students of the presidency along two methodological lines with little interconnection. While presidency-centered researchers mainly conduct statistical or game-theoretic analyses, most president-centered studies are qualitative.

I argue that the division wall between presidency-centered and president-centered explanations of the presidency is built on unsound foundations. Presidency-centered scholars have assumed that the personal characteristics of presidents 1) are of little relevance to understand their behavior and that 2) such features cannot be systematically measured because they are idiosyncratic. Although president-centered researchers do not share these assumptions, they have also failed to recognize that 1) on differential psychology there is a broad consensus on what human personality is, and that 2) personalities tend to be stable over time.

These misconceptions have had profound consequences. Presidency-centered researchers claim that presidents cannot be used as units of analysis in quantitative studies (e.g., King 1993) and that analytically little is lost leaving the uniqueness of the heads of government aside. However, a vast corpus of psychological research contradicts the assumption that the specificity of presidents is irrelevant to understand their behavior. The literature on differential psychology has shown that all individuals have stable personality differences and that these differences strongly explain their behavior (Judge et al. 1999; Goldberg 1990; McCrae and Costa 1997; Costa and McCrae 1992). Since personality traits are stable, they can be systematically studied. Presidents can be treated as units of analysis in statistical analyses. Although president-centered scholars recognize the importance of the personal characteristics of the presidents, they have often discussed psychological attributes of the leaders arbitrarily, paying little attention to psychological research (e.g., Greenstein 2009).

I propose that to have a deeper understanding of the presidency, we need to start testing hypotheses that include presidency-centered and president-centered paradigms. To do so, it is necessary to reposition the individual differences of leaders as a central cause of political phenomena in quantitative research. And we cannot do that unless we absorb the knowledge produced from the discipline that has studied how humans differ from each for the last 130 years.

In recent years, there have been huge advances in coalition theories, particularly concerning coalitions in parliamentary systems. However, much of the literature dealing with coalitions under presidential regimes has tended limit itself to reproducing and importing models from the work on parliamentary regimes, without considering the particularities of presidentialism.

Three features of presidentialism may interfere with the coalition process. First, the main particularity of presidentialism is the “winner-takes-all” principle. This states that the election determines a clear winner.

This feature makes it almost impossible for there to be any surprise in identifying the president-elect[1]. This is quite different from most parliamentary regimes in which the identification of a clear winner may be more difficult, and the subsequent composition of the government is, often, very hard to predict. Indeed, under parliamentary regimes elections consist of a “photograph” that depicts the strength of each party or coalition in parliament in order to determine which will have a majority for forming a government. Figure 1 sets out this difference between the two processes.

The example of Belgium in 2011-2012, where negotiations lasted almost a year and a half, during which the country had no formal government, constitutes a paradigmatic example of this feature. However, this is a recurrent feature of parliamentary politics and has happened = again in Belgium (2015), but also in the UK (2010), Ireland (2016), Spain (2016-17), Germany (2017-18), Italy (2013) and Greece (2014-2015).

The second particularity of presidentialism is the principle of the presidential mandate. This implies that both the inauguration and the conclusion of the presidential mandate are settled by the constitution. This supposes that on the day of the inauguration of the presidency the president has to have his government formed. Moreover, the termination of the mandate should not, theoretically, be dependent on a majority (re)alignment in the congress. Recent events in Brazil have shown that this principle is not deterministic: a president can be impeached for political and opportunistic motivations.

Finally, the third particularity of presidential regimes is symmetrical bicameralism. As a matter of fact, bicameral congresses under presidentialism used to be symmetric, i.e. both chambers used to have the same powers and attributes. This is quite different from parliamentary regimes, where most of the upper chambers – except in Italy – have a mere consultative role.

This is of particular importance as bicameralism supposes a two-round procedure in the policymaking process for the president, thus increasing what Lupia and Strøm (2008) call “the shadow of the unexpected”. For this reason, it is reasonable to state that for those polities with a bicameral congress, holding a bicameral majority is a relevant condition for both the policymaking process and coalition governance (Hiroi and Rennó 2014). By the same token, controlling only one of the two chambers by the president might not be sufficient to ensure that policies get approval, or even to guarantee the survival of the coalition.

When considering coalition cabinet formation and dissolution, I argue that this third particularism is strongly linked to the first two. Indeed, for too long, scholars have studied coalitions under presidential regimes as they did under parliamentarism: assuming that the executive needed to look for allies in only one chamber. However, symmetric bicameralism makes such an assumption untenable. In fact, bicameralism, particularly symmetrical bicameralism in presidential regimes, may contain significant constraints for policymaking and coalition duration. Indeed, controlling one of the two chambers may not be sufficient for the president to ensure policy approval.

This misconsideration is particularly true when reviewing the literature about coalition cabinets under presidential regimes. More particularly, an important number of works have modeled the president’s ability to govern based on his/her legislative strength, or on the distribution of portfolios following Gamson’s law (i.e based on the proportionality principal of the strength of each party in the legislative branch), also known as “coalition congruence”. However almost every study dealing with this issue has measured the legislative strength or coalition congruence, based only on their observation of the lower chamber. In other words, almost no study has ever considered the upper chamber (i. e the Senate) as a relevant actor in the coalition process. We need to consider both bicameralism and bicameral majorities as relevant variables for the understanding of coalition cabinets under presidential regimes. The only work on this topic in parliamentary regimes reaches contradictory conclusions (Eppner and Ganghof 2016; Druckman et al. 2005; Diermeier et al. 2007; Druckman and Thies 2002)

This is what this paper tries to explore, focusing on Latin American presidential regimes that have experienced coalition cabinets.

First of all, half of Latin American countries (9/18) have a bicameral legislature. Bicameralism is not a trivial issue. This number is even higher if we compute every government since the third wave of democratization in the region, which began in 1979. Indeed, I have considered 134 governments in the region, i.e., cabinets following electoral processes. Of these, 54.47% (74) were formed in bicameral polities.

Moreover, when focusing on the occurrence of coalition cabinets, the relevance of bicameralism becomes even more central. Indeed, based on a strict but common definition of coalition cabinets (see Albala 2016), I have computed 31 newly formed coalition cabinets since 1980. That is 31 cabinets that were coalitions on the day of the president assumed office (See Table 1).

Of those 31 coalitions, 29 (93,5%) were formed in bicameral polities. Only Ecuadorian coalitions were formed in polities with a unicameral congress. In other words, for every ten coalitions to be formed in Latin American presidential regimes, more than nine occurred in polities with a bicameral congress. Why has no-one ever considered this feature?

The bicameral condition

I stated above that bicameral congresses under presidential regimes used to be symmetric, that is to say that the two houses (House of Deputies and the Senate) used to share similar attributes and powers. Thus, to ensure governability, a president-elect prefers to enjoy a bicameral majority rather than a partial majority (only one chamber) or no majority.

I have stated also the principle of a fixed presidential mandate. The president’s mandate not only concerns the end of the administration but also the beginning. Thus, the process of cabinet formation under presidentialism is limited in time, running from the proclamation of the result of the election to the inauguration day, generally fixed by the constitution. This feature supposes that the president will have formed his/her cabinet by inauguration.

Then, in order to determine how the combination of those two features (bicameralism + fixed mandate) may affect the coalition formation process, I compared the parliamentary strength of the coalitions after the election day of the president, with their strength at inauguration day.

We may, thus, theoretically, expect that presidents-elect who could not get a bicameral majority on the day of their election would seek to enlarge their parliamentary support including newcomers to their electoral alliance.

Results and findings

In Table 2, I identify 29 presidents-elect, comparing their legislative strength at election day with their strength at inauguration day. I simplified the operationalization of the legislative strength into three categories: i) no presidential majority at all ; ii) a legislative majority in one House; and, iii) a bicameral majority.

The data clearly confirms the hypothesis. Indeed, only 37.93% (11/29) of the presidents-elect had a bicameral majority (2) at election day. Nevertheless, the rate raises at 65.6% (19/29) at inauguration day, indicating that 8 presidents-elect proceeded to open negotiations with other parties to form a coalition or enlarge their electoral coalition. In other words, 8 presidents-elect who could not obtain a bicameral majority via the election, decided to include new members before their inauguration in order to get a bicameral majority. Conversely, the rate of minority coalitions (full or partial) fell from 62,06% ( 0= 31,03% + 1= 31.03%) to 34,4% (10,3% +24,13%).

Additionally, among the presidents who failed to obtain bicameral majorities, the first three Chilean presidents since the return of democracy (Aylwin, Frei and Lagos) had to deal with a particular constitutional feature inherited from the Pinochet rule: the existence of 9 designated senators, mostly from the military forces, who prevented the government from reaching a majority in the Senate.

By contrast, the data shows that bicameralism has been a central feature for presidents-elect who were not able to reach a bicameral majority while running alone. Indeed, among the three cases that ran alone on election day, all of them negotiated with new partners and achieved a bicameral majority.

In the cases where the length of time between election day and and inauguration day is longer – Uruguay and Brazil – there was a high degree of coalition enlargement and only one president-elect failed to achieve a bicameral majority (Lula I). However, among the polities with the shortest of time between election day and and inauguration day we can distinguish between Bolivian presidents-elect who have always managed to obtain a bicameral majority and Argentinian presidents-elect, who led coalition cabinets, but who have never enjoyed majorities in the two houses. Therefore, the timing condition deserves further attention.

We also found that in the cases where president-elect won a majority in only one chamber, the chamber in which the president-elect was unable to reach a majority was systematically the Senate. Hence, the upper chamber seems to be harder to conquer for presidents. This finding should also open a new line of investigation.

Finally, we also found that a bicameral majority makes it easier for the coalition governance generally and, thus, constitutes a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for enduring coalition agreements.

In this work, I have highlighted the need to adapt the study of coalition cabinets under presidential regimes to the particularities of such regimes. Indeed, I have shown out that presidentialism has a critical impact on the timing of the coalition formation process. Moreover, bicameralism is a central feature for the presidents-elect. These elements, in turn, open up new fields of study. For instance, no study has ever considered the role of the vice-president. However, vice-presidents can play a key role, especially when when (e.g. Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela) they are also the chair of the upper house.

Notes

[1] There are, however, some exceptions. For example, Bolivia used to have a system that could lead to “surprises”. Indeed until 2008, when no candidate reached the absolute majority, the run off used to take place in parliament leading to parliamentary bargains. Sometimes, the president-elect was not the one who won the plurality at the popular election.

This is a guest post by Ludger Helms, Professor of Political Science and Chair of Comparative Politics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. It is the expanded summary of an article that has just been published in Politics. The full article is ungated and can be accessed free of charge.

As observers of presidential power and leadership we have a vested interest in understanding what makes presidents successful leaders, and what may limit and undermine presidential performance. One of the most basic and popular positions to be encountered in the international literature on presidential power and leadership is that the president’s status and performance depends largely on the number and substance of the resources that he or she commands. Resources are usually considered to include in particular a wealth of institutional and political items (such as the powers of office, the availability of administrative and political support staff, large and stable majorities, or a fresh electoral mandate).

Arguably the greatest advantage of resource-oriented approaches, compared to classic personalist or institutionalist understandings of presidential power and leadership, is that they are keen to avoid both reductionism and determinism, and leave ample room for agency. That is, presidents are not already efficient and successful performers if they command a decent set of resources, but only if they are able to use them adroitly. Still, the dominant assumption of most authors in the field clearly seems to be that the more institutional and political resources are available to a president, the more successful he or she is likely to be.

This may seem plausible, even compelling. And yet, this is not what political reality in many presidential (and other) regimes would appear to correspond to. The presidency of Donald Trump is just the most obvious recent example of a newly elected president whose party controls both the executive and the legislative branch, but who nevertheless conspicuously failed to make any major move for about the first 11 months in power (until the passage of the major tax cut bill early in December 2017). In terms of job approval, Trump soon became the most unpopular president in the history of political polling. Other examples of presidents who appeared to have what it takes to perform successfully, and still failed spectacularly, can be found. Just think of President François Hollande of France who succeeded what had by then been the Fifth Republic’s most unpopular president, and was the first Socialist president facing a National Assembly and Senate controlled by the Socialist Party. Later on, following the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris of November 2015, he was even fitted with special emergency powers, which seemed set to honour the unspoken promise of crises as welcome opportunities and power boosters for political chief executives. And yet, Hollande ended up as clearly one of the Fifth Republic’s weakest presidents ever, and the only one as yet who did not even dare to seek re-election when his first term drew to a close.

What may seem an arbitrary glance at the larger picture of presidential leadership and performance is actually substantiated by more systematic assessments of the political status and fate of presidents in different regimes. For example, a recent empirical study on US presidents found that ‘presidents are considered stronger under divided as opposed to unified government’, and ‘divided government presidents are more popular than unified government ones’ (Cohen 2015, p. 81). In the same vein, those French presidents that had to perform under the strongly power-restricting state of ‘cohabitation’ (the French counterpart to American ‘divided government’) overall had better re-election records than many presidents commanding a sizeable majority. And while this forum is dedicated to presidential politics, it still seems worth noting that these patterns are not confined to the family of presidential or semi-presidential democracies: Indeed, many prime ministers in parliamentary democracies heading particularly cumbersome coalition governments, widely believed to make prime ministers weak and vulnerable, have enjoyed higher job approval scores than their counterparts in more power-concentrating environments.

How can this be explained? One key to this would appear to be expectations: Presidents commanding an impressive arsenal of institutional and political resources are likely to raise high expectations among the public, which will then play an independent role in shaping presidential performance, or more precisely in influencing the perceived performance of presidents. Ultimately, in politics as elsewhere, virtually all performance is perceived performance, and perceptions tend to be strongly shaped by previous expectations.

A second possible source of this apparent paradox could be the presidents themselves: Exceptionally resource-rich presidents may tend towards complacency which may undermine the seriousness of their efforts to provide effective problem-solving and leadership, and will eventually be reflected in unfavourable assessments of their performance. Alternatively, they may make full and unconditional use of their resources, possibly resorting to overly aggressive and ruthless leadership styles, in a desperate attempt to meet the towering expectations they face, which is equally unlikely to find the approval and support of the wider public.

Are less resource-rich leaders, after all, better off than their structurally better situated counterparts? As highlighted above, there is some evidence suggesting that, in fact, ‘less can be more’. In order to fully capture this phenomenon, it is useful to remind ourselves that in mainstream political research resources and constraints are widely considered to mark two opposite and complementary phenomena. Understood this way, leaders having few resources at their disposal could, alternatively, be characterized as leaders facing strong constraints. Strictly speaking, of course, even resource-rich leaders may face strong constraints, and leaders facing few obvious constraints may still have limited resources, but the main thrust of the argument is that, other things being equal, resources make leaders powerful, while constraints limit and weaken them.

Rethinking the observations about presidential and prime ministerial performance made above, I suggest to develop an alternative understanding of constraints, and to think of constraints as potential ‘negative resources’. The term ‘negative resource’ seeks to highlight the hidden potential of an apparent constraint. A ‘negative resource’ is a constraint successfully transformed into a positive source that may benefit the status and performance of a political leader. This possible transformation is the result of a complex process which involves in particular a leader’s skills, yet also a wealth of highly contingent contextual factors and, not least, the perception of that leader by others. Again, expectations, in this case modest expectations, would appear to explain much of the support and success that constrained leaders may have. As empirical studies suggest, citizens prefer politicians who set a low expectation and exceed it to those who promise much, and then fail to deliver (Malhotra and Margalit 2014: 1014). But it’s not all about subjective expectations and promises kept: Providing effective leadership from a resource-poor position and in power-dispersing environments marks, by any standard, a more difficult task and greater achievement than simply pulling the levers of power in strongly power-concentrating regimes, and thus deserves to be valued more highly.

More recently, this realization has come to be acknowledged also in normative reflections about leadership in contemporary politics. For most contemporary scholars of political leadership, strong leaders and leadership are two things of the past, not only dated but outright dangerous to any form of genuine democratic governance. Collaborative leadership, shared leadership, and other related concepts are widely seen to mark superior alternative approaches for political leadership in the twenty-first century.

To be sure, all this may seem to amount to a major paradox marking the challenges of presidential leadership, and political leadership more generally, in a new ‘anti-political age’. However, it is important to note that the basic phenomenon is not new at all. In fact, at least since the Philadelphia Convention ambitions have been made ‘to promote ‘leadership’ while constraining ‘leaders’’ (Rhodes and ‘t Hart 2014: 2). It just seems to have taken another quarter of a millennium, witnessing some great successes and many more disastrous failures of political leadership, to truly bring out the deeper truth in this.

The link between institutions and democratic survival is at the heart of a vibrant scholarly exchange, debating the virtues and perils of parliamentary and presidential systems. Presidentialism in Latin America, but also in former Soviet republics, correlates strongly with authoritarianism. But what if this correlation is an artefact? What if it is rooted in a constellation of conditions that predate the choice of institutions? In other words, are presidential institutions shallow causes of democratic consolidation? In a newly published paper, I argue that the conditions under which different types of executives are chosen following regime transitions are indeed a key to the puzzle. I propose an explanation that suggests that the intrinsic features of presidential systems are less relevant than the conditions that facilitate the installation of vertically-concentrated executive power.

I focus on a specific form of context: infrastructural state capacity understood as “the institutional capacity of a central state, despotic or not, to penetrate its territories and logistically implement decisions” (Mann 1993: 59). Many of the new states that were born after the 18th century, and especially after World War II, were not consolidated and suffered from limited infrastructural capacity. Interestingly, many of these new states also emerged with vertically-concentrated presidential arrangements: I do not think this is a coincidence. In situations where infrastructural state capacity is most deficient, the vertical concentration of executive power in the hands of a few players becomes more likely.

To look into this relationship, I examined 26 post-communist countries over the period between 1989 and 2009. This set of countries is an ideal testing ground to probe this relationship, since the environment of state capacity is temporally prior to the selection of institutions. Most new constitutions were established in a time period ranging from a few months (Hungary) to up to five years (Ukraine) after the collapse of communism. To capture the level of power concentration in the hands of the executive, I employed two indicators. Table 1 presents the scores of both indicators in the year of the first post-communist constitution. The first encapsulates the formal level of power concentration from Frye, Hellman and Tucker’s Data Base on Political Institutions in the Post-Communist World (2000). In this measurement, powers of popularly elected presidents are scored from (1) to (21), where (1) represents the weakest presidents in terms of constitutional provisions, and (21) the presidents endowed with the most prerogatives. The second indicator taps into informal practices. I used the item called “constraints on chief executive” from the Polity IV dataset (Marshall and Jaggers, 2012). This measures the operational (de facto) independence of the chief executive in relations to other players. The categories range from (1) where the chief executive has unlimited authority, through (7) where the chief executive is at parity or subordination to other institutional players (legislative assembly, prime minister, constitutional court). Harnessing both formal and informal aspects of executive power allows me to grasp the phenomenon of power concentration in an encompassing fashion.

The analyses provide unambiguous support for my core argument that state capacity is crucial to establish executive dominance over other institutional players. State capacity at the onset of independence (or transition) helps to explain the level of executive power concentration in the newly designed constitutions. This means that in environments with weak infrastructural state capacity it is easier for politicians aiming to secure state power or to access to the state’s power resources to push for the adoption of strong, vertical forms of executive power. Once in place, these power structures have proven quite durable, although some countries have recently enacted reforms to curb executive power, at least on paper. This also helps explain why the record of presidentialism has been so dire in the region; it is not the institution of a president per se that is harmful to democracy, rather the extent to which power is concentrated.

Even though I find these strong relationships in my research, there are some important caveats. Many of these institutional setups are static over time, hence my models face difficulties to explain recent occurrences of executive power concentration that were accompanied with democratic backsliding. Turkey is a case in point, where we can observe the demise of a democracy in a brazen power grab at the hands of a leader seeking to establish a presidential vertical. Yet, the state was not weak at that point. Hungary is another example, with the authoritarian tendencies of its government, and Prime Minister, to curtail political rights and freedoms, as well as dilute institutional checks and balances. Hungary is particularly problematic for my argument, since it should have been a least likely candidate for such a reversal.

A strong state is therefore no guarantee against executives engaging in power grabs; a weak state simply makes it easier.

More and more scholars and citizens want to know not only how women access presidential power, but what women do with this power once they are in office. Do female presidents use their power to promote change favoring women? I tackle this question by examining gender in the executive branch in Latin America—a region that has elected female presidents more times (nines so far) than any other region of the world.

There are some theoretical reasons to believe that female presidents will use their presidential power to promote change favoring women. In a recent article in Latin American Politics and Society, I argued that female presidents are more likely than male presidents to nominate women to their cabinets.

There are two reasons for this. The first speaks to bottom-up pressures from voters and the second to top-down, elite factors. First, female presidents are more likely than their male counterparts to interpret their mandate as a call for a greater female presence in the executive branch. Voting for a female president could easily be interpreted as a desire not just for a female president, but also for more female ministers. Female presidents thus may appoint more women to their cabinets because they believe their constituencies want them to.

Turning to top-down factors, the second reason has to do with the kinds of personal qualities presidents seek when they choose their ministers. In Latin America, presidents have virtually no formal restrictions on who they can nominate (i.e. no legislative body approves the presidents’ ministerial picks). So much of cabinet decision-making is based on informal considerations.

Presidents tend to seek ministerial candidates with two specific qualities: like-mindedness and loyalty. They look for like-minded ministers because they need someone who generally agrees with their policy ideas, or is at least like-minded enough to productively disagree and produce a better solution. Presidents also need loyal ministers who will faithfully execute their legislative agenda and are unlikely to threaten their hold on power.

Why would female presidents be more likely than male presidents to perceive women as more like-minded and loyal? The homophily principle and scholarship on gendered political networks helps explain this. Gender homophily is the recurring phenomenon where, ceteris paribus, women tend to associate more with women and men tend to associate more with men. Studies on gendered political networks suggest that male-dominance tends to feed on itself, making it difficult for women to penetrate male networks. On the flip side, because elite female politicians are more likely than their male counterparts to network with women, female presidents are more likely to perceive elite female politicians as like-minded and loyal.

So there are two reasons why we should expect female presidents and female ministers to present certain affinities. First, female presidents are more likely to face bottom-up pressures to do so. Second, female presidents are more likely to view female ministerial candidates as like-minded and loyal. They therefore face elite-based incentives to name more female ministers. These bottom-up mandate and top-down elite variables may both function as mechanisms linking presidents’ sex to a use of power to enhance women’s presence in cabinets.

But there’s a catch. While male presidents often historically have named all-male cabinets, female presidents are highly unlikely to completely exclude men. This is in part because female presidents face an informal constraint in assembling their cabinets. One of the most important constraints on their ability to name female ministers is the supply of female ministerial candidates. One major determinant of the supply is “political capital resources,” which can refer to relationships with party elites and with industries or social groups related to a particular ministry (i.e. women’s groups for Women’s Ministries).

Because women are less likely than men to possess “political capital resources,” the female pool ministerial candidates is generally much more shallow than the male pool. So I also argue that female presidents are more likely to “make a difference” in terms of women’s presence in cabinets when the pool of female ministerial candidates is deepest. Right after their inauguration, the pool for both male and female candidates is deeper than later on in the presidential term. As presidents later fire and hire ministers, the pool of qualified candidates will continue to shrink. I predicted that female presidents’ decision-making in naming women to cabinet is most likely to statistically differ from male presidents’ decision-making at the beginning rather than at the end of their terms.

The depth of the female ministerial pool also depends on certain characteristics of ministries. Some ministries are more associated with traditionally “feminine” roles and qualities—for example education and health. Others, namely defense and finance, are more “masculine.” There will tend to be more female ministerial candidates for “feminine” ministries because female politicians are more likely to possess political capital resources in traditionally feminine domains than traditionally masculine domains. For example, female politicians are more likely to possess political capital resources in areas of education rather than defense; they are more likely to have networked with social organizations related to schools than the military.

In short, I argue that female presidents overall are more likely than their male counterparts to name women to the cabinets. However, due to supply constraints, female presidents’ impact will likely be strongest for their inaugural cabinets and for “feminine” ministries.

I tested this theory on an original database of all inaugural and end-of-term cabinets by all democratically elected presidents from 1999-2015 in 18 Latin American countries. The dataset included 1,908 ministers. I found some evidence that presidentas in Latin America tended to name more women to their cabinets, and the most consistent evidence showed that they were more likely to name women to their inaugural cabinets and to “feminine” ministries. The dataset is located on the Harvard dataverse and on my web site www.reyes-housholder.com where you can access all the documents you would need to replicate my findings.

To conclude, there are theoretical reasons to believe and empirical evidence showing that female presidents will use at least their delegative power to improve women’s numerical representation in the executive branch.

We are announcing a new book series, Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics. The series is edited by Robert Elgie and Gianluca Passarelli and the books will be published by Palgrave Macmillan. The series will include books on all aspects of presidential politics. We are currently accepting proposals for books in the series. The first volume, authored Philipp Köker, will be published in 2017.

Palgrave Studies in Presidential Politics will include books on contemporary presidencies, including presidential powers, the administrative presidency, and presidential advisers, as well as the history of presidential offices, and presidential biographies. The series will also include books on presidential elections, including presidential party politics, and the media and presidential communication.

The series will focus on presidents throughout the world including the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, including both directly elected and indirectly elected presidents. The series will publish single-country and comparative studies of presidential politics. The series will also publish books on individual presidents. The series will focus primarily on empirical studies of presidential politics, but it could include volumes on conceptual or theoretical aspects, such as how to measure presidential power.

The series will publish books that look at the reform of presidential politics, e.g. the reform of presidential elections. However, it will not publish obviously partisan, clearly normative, or personally critical studies of presidents or presidential politics. The series will have a disinterested, academic focus.

The series will normally take the form of 80,000-word monographs, or edited volumes. However, shorter books, or Palgrave Pivots, will also be considered. To submit a proposal, you should complete a proposal form. These are available from Ambra Finotello (ambra.finotello@palgrave.com), or from the series editors.

For further information about the series and to submit a proposal for consideration, please contact Ambra Finotello (ambra.finotello@palgrave.com) at Palgrave, or the series editors, Robert Elgie (robert.elgie@dcu.ie), and Gianluca Passarelli (gianluca.passarelli@uniroma1.it).

Feel free to send an informal e-mail to the series editors if you wish to discuss a book idea prior to the formal submission of a proposal. We look forward to hearing your ideas for books and to receiving your submissions.

With its changes in the political and economic realm, 1989 to many citizens in Central and Eastern Europe marked a spark of great hope for the establishment of a western-style political, legal, and economic order. The aim of the new elite was the introduction of democracy and the rule of law. One important tool to achieve these goals was that of constitutions. The post-1989 constitution-making processes have also been widely discussed in political science research (Arato 2000; Elster 1993; Elster, Offe & Preuß 1998; Holmes & Sunstein 1995; Kitschelt 1994; Sartori 1997). However, since then it has become apparent that the different countries’ pathways do not fulfill the great hopes referred to above. Either the pathways were longer than initially expected or they reached an impasse due to (semi‑)authoritarianism and a poverty trap. These only partially fulfilled hopes also apply to the development of the constitutional systems (see also Rosenfeld, Sadurski & Toniatti 2015).

Against this background, we analyze constitutional politics in 20 post-socialist countries from two perspectives. We focus on constitutional politics following the implementation of the first post-soviet constitution after 1989 and examine all successful amendments and unsuccessful draft amendments, including failed attempts to establish a new constitution, up until 2015.[1] Thus, we considerably broaden the perspective on constitutional studies, since failed amendment initiatives have hardly ever been studied[2], even though such a “success-oriented” angle significantly narrows the data and information on constitutional processes (see Mahoney & Thelen 2010). We focus on three main research questions: How do democratization or autocratization processes influence constitutional politics and vice versa? Do external actors exert a significant influence on constitutional politics? And: Is the ‘transition paradigm’ still applicable to Central and Eastern Europe?

Constitutional politics after the enactment of the first post-socialist constitutions in Central and Eastern Europe – here used in the narrow sense of constitution-making, constitutional amendments, and the national discourse about the constitution and its changes – have dealt with a broad spectrum of topics. In our analysis of 20 Central and Eastern European countries, we find that there is virtually no individual constitutional subfield that has not been the target of amendments or amendment initiatives in at least one of these countries. With this perspective, the variety of topics has led us to assume that certain patterns of constitutional politics might be distinguished.

Most certainly, we can observe problems of path dependence and action constraints. These have particularly emerged with regard to the democracy-autocracy divide. In particular, Belarus and Russia present a case of a thorough autocratization[3], whereas e.g. in Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Moldova certain constitutional provisions ultimately led to democratic deficits or were not helpful in preventing them. However, we can also see the light at the end of the tunnel, i.e. countries in which constitutional politics can actually make a positive difference. The constitutional amendments pursued in Poland solved severe inter-institutional conflicts, and in Croatia and Slovakia semi-autocratic structures were actually replaced with a democratic constitutional arrangement.

The most important constitutional subfields are legislative-executive relations, national identity and minority rights, and aspects related to EU accession. In this post we focus primarily on the findings concerning the relationship between presidents and cabinets within the executive. We particularly expected to find draft amendments in this realm in countries with conflict-prone constitutional specifications, such as Albania, Croatia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. And indeed, the question of presidential power, the agent-principal relation between president and prime minister, and questions of negative or positive parliamentarism dominated both constitutional discourses and politics in a number of countries (in particular in Albania, Croatia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine). Whereas in two of those cases the respective problems in the institutional design were solved by means of a thorough constitutional reform (in Croatia) or a new constitution (in Poland), in the other four cases constitutional reforms did not lead to an enduring pacification of institutional conflicts or a higher efficiency of governance. Not surprisingly, Albania, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine are the countries in our group of 20 cases that witnessed the most serious crises at the heart of their governmental systems.

We believe that these crises, or sometimes even shifts between authoritarianism and democracy, are closely related to constitutional politics. Constitutions can provide the context within which a democracy can thrive (e.g. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovenia). However, sometimes constitutional politics also contribute to a failed democratization (Belarus after 1994, Croatia and Serbia until 2000/2001). We see that autocratization virtually appears as constitutional choice by design, in particular by establishing over-powerful presidential institutions (e.g. Albania, especially until 1998, or Belarus). Furthermore, constitutional choices concerning executive-legislative relations can also become a ‘political battlefield’, such as in Moldova or Ukraine, where executive-legislative relations, or in particular the choice between a premier-presidentialism or presidential-parliamentarism, were vigorously debated. Yet, constitutional amendments have not necessarily advanced the countries’ democratic development (as exemplified by the ‘ping-pong game’ in Ukraine or the constitutional and political stalemate 2009–2012 in Moldova). Thus, some of the country studies suggest that not only the degree of democratic quality, but also the direction of democratic development can be represented in a constitution. Aleksandr Lukašenko, Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman, and Vladimir Putin did not gain their powerful positions only – if at all – by breaking the constitution. The constitutional choices made during early post-socialist transition have instead featured as a necessary condition for their successes. And although the type of governmental system certainly has no clear causal effect on the success or failure of democracy (see in particular, and representative for the debate, Cheibub 2007), the constitutional crises in these countries did center around the question of legislative-executive relations, thus making the type of governmental system the focal point of the constitutional debate regarding the success of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe.

[1] The selection criterion here is that such attempts have at least gone through the formal amendment procedure as outlined by the valid constitution.[2] The rare exceptions are Köppl (2003), Rasch and Congleton (2006), and Lutz (1994).[3] All references to individual countries refer to the analysis in the respective country chapters in the edited volume (Fruhstorfer and Hein 2016).